Monthly Archives: October 2010

Is it work-in-progress or a demo, a finished track or a funny field recording captured during your last visit in the football stadium? Sharing is personal and it’s more fun to put some personal context around something you’ve been working hard to create. That’s why, in the third and final act today, we’re introducing…

Third Act: The Sharing Note

The sharing note is integrated into the new upload and sharing flow and lets you enter a personal message when sharing your track. The sharing note will then be shown below your track to people who follow you on their Dashboards and additionally will overwrite any default custom message you’ve entered for the automatic pushes to Facebook and Twitter (you can set that up right here). This is how it works:

After having selected your settings and given access to your contacts, you’ll be taken to a second screen that looks like this:

You’re now able to enter a personal message that will be shown under your track on your followers’ Dashboards and also be included in email notifications:

If you have connected your social networking accounts, your sharing note will be the message pushed to your accounts – in my case to Twitter and Facebook. Note: the sharing note will overwrite the default message you have entered in your connections.

The sharing note work for both private or public tracks and sets.

When you go back to change the settings on your track or to add new contacts, you’ll be able to add a new sharing note:

We hope you like this new addition to the sharing flow and can’t wait to see the first couple of sharing notes popping up on our Dashboards.

Read about today’s First and Second Act and as always, let us know what you think in the comments (and if something’s not working right).

To make the uploading and transcoding process more transparent, we’ve added a new progress bar that will keep you informed about the state of your upload including how much time our robots will approximately need to get your track ready for the Cloud.

While your file is uploading and transcoding, you’re able to upload artwork, edit the track description and metadata and can save your input at any time without interrupting the upload. You’ll see that we’ve reviewed the design a bit and that you can toggle open additional options to add a buy and video link to your track.

You’ll notice that we’ve also redesigned the track and set settings and added three buttons to make it easier for you to select the settings when sharing your track or set. You’re still able to make your track public or private and the three new icons will let you enable/disable downloads, widget sharing and streaming via third-party applications:

Downloads: enable or disable downloads of your original track

Widget sharing: allow anyone to click the share button and embed the widget for your track or set. Alternatively, you can choose the share button to be only visible to yourself.

Apps: you can choose to make your track available for streaming via third-party applications.

When you make your track private and click Add/Remove peoplethat will open an overlay where you can select the people you’d like to give access to your track.

Clicking Save will take you to a second screen for something called the Sharing Note which we introduce in depth in this blog post.

Now here’s something else new: we’re making the Secret Link feature available for all account plans. It’s now possible to get a Secret Link with a free account! The cool thing: it also lets you create Secret Widgets to embed your track or set to your website without making it publicly available on SoundCloud. To learn how to use the Secret Widget, read this extensive blog post. You can find the Secret Link and embed code for your track when clicking the Share button above your track or set (considering it’s set to private):

What do you think? Let us know what you think in the comments and read about today’s First and Third Act in case you’ve missed them.

Sounds are social. It doesn’t matter if you’re capturing sounds out in the wild, spending sleepless nights writing this one particular song or composing music for a new Hamlet play, getting immediate feedback on your work is always special, validating and gratifying. We all love to see the play counter go from 0 to 10 to 1000 and sometimes even beyond. Receiving that first timed comment, a retweet or Facebook like after sharing your creation with the people that matter most to you is what drives us to make SoundCloud better every day. So today, we’ve got some exciting news to share with you.

In short: using SoundCloud just got a hell of a lot easier, in three acts. On to the first one…

First Act: The New Dashboard

Last month, we released a first step towards a new and more streamlined Dashboard with the aim to keep you better updated about what’s going on in your SoundCloud world.

Today, we’re happy to roll out the full new version of the new Dashboard and are finally re-introducing the Dashboard settings y’all have been missing so dearly (thanks for your patience)! Here’s what’s new:

On the top left of your Dashboard, you’ll find a new settings picker that lets you select the updates you’d like to see in your stream.

Tracks: you’re able to select your Dashboard to show exclusive tracks (tracks shared only with you, your DropBox or to a few other people), tracks from people you follow and tracks from people you don’t follow. They’ll appear in two separate new tabs: Incoming tracks and Exclusive tracks.

Activity on your tracks: you’ll get notified about new timed and regular comments on your tracks and also when others add one of your tracks to their favorites in another new Dashboard tab.

Activity from people you follow: you’re also able to opt into receiving updates about comments and favorites from the people you follow on SoundCloud to see what they’ve been up to.

Conversations: here’s where you’ll be able to select to stay updated about replies to your timed and regular comments (called mentions), new posts in the forums you’re involved in and follow-up comments that keep you updated with comments from others in places you were active.

And here’s another new addition: Introduction sharings

Every now and then, your Dashboard will show you a track from someone you’re not following. We call this an introduction sharing and will be the first track ever shared with you by this user and is a nice way to discover new and interesting people to follow that you’d perhaps have missed otherwise.

Read about today’s Second and Third Act and as always, let us know what you think in the comments (or if something’s not working right).